Muthoni Mutonyi

We won. The whole thing.

I have news, and I am going to deliver it with the restraint of someone who has absolutely no restraint left: the bank I work for won the interbank games. Not a category. Not a podium finish in one discipline that we will mention at every staff meeting until 2031. The overall trophy. The one that says, for one glorious season, we are the fittest bankers in the land.

I would love to take credit. I was, after all, on the swim team. But honesty compels me to report that I was one swimmer among many athletes, and that the butterfly and I are still in negotiations. What I can tell you is this: I showed up, I dove in head first (a sentence I could not have typed a month ago without lying), and I swam my lanes while colleagues who have no business being that loud at a swimming pool cheered as if it were a title fight.

My contribution was points. Modest points. But points, I am now reliably informed, are how you win games. So I am counting myself in.

The closing ceremony

I attended the closing ceremony, which is not a sentence I expected to write either. Ceremonies, in my experience, are where enthusiasm goes to sit politely in rows. This one was jubilant. People were hugging strangers. Someone from a rival bank congratulated me as if we had grown up together. I met more new colleagues in one evening than I have in years of email signatures, and within minutes we were all on our feet, shouting the bank’s name in a tune I am fairly sure was improvised on the spot.

There is a particular kind of camaraderie that only shows up when a group of people has spent weeks of evenings, and more Saturdays than anyone admitted to their families, training for something that has nothing to do with their actual jobs. You see it in the way the footballers cheered for the swimmers, the swimmers cheered for the runners, and everybody cheered for whoever had the trophy at that moment, which changed hands roughly every forty seconds for photos.

When the final results were read out and our name came last, in the way that means first, the noise was something I felt in my ribs. I am an introvert. I do not, as a rule, feel things in my ribs in public. And yet.

Then there was a party

Of course there was a party. A trophy that size does not go home quietly.

I need to explain something about my relationship with parties. My natural habitat after 9pm is a sofa, a book, and the quiet dignity of not being perceived. I attend parties the way other people attend dental appointments: I show up, I am pleasant, I leave at the earliest moment that will not be commented on.

That is not what happened. I danced. Not the polite two step you do near the buffet so nobody asks if you are okay. Actual dancing, in the middle of the floor, with people I normally only see in meetings about things I will not name here. We danced late into the night. At one point I looked at the time, saw a number that started with a one, and simply kept going. If anyone has footage, I would like to remind you that we are a team now, and teams protect each other.

Somewhere between the second and third song, a feeling crept up on me that I did not expect. I felt proud of where I work. Not the kind of proud you write in a performance review. The kind you feel when you look around a room and realise that everyone in it chose to show up for something that was not in their job description, and they gave it everything, and you did too.

Now, about those numbers

And here is where I show you that you can take the woman out of the bank, but you cannot take the bank out of the woman, even at a party, even at one in the morning.

Because somewhere on the dance floor, between the celebration and the sore feet, a small voice in my head said: this is lovely, now let us hope the financials are also winning.

We have proven we can sprint, swim, kick, and dance until the DJ gives up. We have the trophy to show for it. My quiet prayer, as I limped home, was that the balance sheet has been training just as hard as the swim team. That somewhere in a spreadsheet, our numbers are also doing laps after hours and giving up their Saturdays.

If they are, I will see you at that party too. I may even dance. But I am leaving at eleven.